Lord, That I May See

We went on a nature walk today. We brought our "Nature Study Notebooks" for sketching and our field guides of wild flowers and birds, and had a great morning in the beautiful weather. In other happy news, yesterday we all heard the baby's heartbeat! 10 weeks is early to hear it, so I was excited. It makes it all real now, a little fig-sized baby swimming in there. And the 3 girls were with me, so that made it even better. :)   (Sorry about the picture quality recently.  Until I decide whether to pay $2.50 a month for more photo storage or do something like move the blog, Blogger will only let me upload pics from my phone. And I haven't gotten the hang of my phone camera yet.)

I would say that I have been homeschooling my children for a while now, here and there, very informally. This year, however, with Turtle now 6 and a half and in "1st grade" I started to regularly homeschool on Sept 10. We "do school," as the girls say, Mon through Thurs, leaving Friday free for Atrium. All this means to me is that at least one pre-planned learning activity is done every day. I am happy with how relaxed and manageable this is right now. Rosebud has the patience for only about one sit-down work and Sunshine doesn't like being left out for too long. Turtle is usually hungry for more and so I try to direct her to extension-type work of the new concept introduced at her quiet time or as the others run off to play and her attention span is still intact. :) Ultimately, I would like to have enough space for all the learning materials I introduce to be available to them anytime such that that classic Montessori/unschooling question of "What wo...

The girls have made a list. A very important list of options for the names of our 4th child! I didn't interfere with this list except to help with (a bit) with spelling and to suggest Justin (which I love, but doesn't go super with our last name). The girls are very excited to meet the new little one, due in the middle of April. When I told my dad, he said, "Ah, here's when it starts to get easier! You'll have a very helpful 7 year old." You bet I will! I'm excited to share this time with the girls, the older of which were only 3 and 1 last time I was pregnant. Wow. What names do you like on the list? :)

Last night, when the bigger girls had gone to Daddy's softball game, Sunshine and I took a little walk. Well, the distance that we walked was little, probably .3 miles, however the time it took was over an hour. We stopped to look at everything, rocks, leaves, paint on the sidewalk, blades of grass. She fixed her baby in the stroller, took sitting breaks, filled her "diaper bag" with leaves, checked inside every storm drain and chattered the whole way. As the minute hand inched closer to 7 o'clock and since we had started at 5:40, without having eaten dinner, I must confess I began to hurry her. But overall I was very glad for her opportunity to walk without her sisters (or her Daddy) to rush off ahead with goal-oriented speed. It's good to slow down sometimes. “At the age of two years the child has a need for walking…But the child does not want to get anywhere, he just wants to walk, and to help him truly, the adult must follow the child…The child walks with...